An Irishman's Diary

WE HEAR constantly these days about projects being “rolled out”, even when the technology involved is square or rectangular and has no wheels attached. But in the case of work now under way at the National University of Ireland Maynooth (NUIM), the term is for once fully justified.

This particular project centres on a 300-foot-long scroll: about the size of a fire engine hose, but composed of paper stitched on linen and bearing an estimated 300,000 signatures.

It was rolled almost 170 years ago in Ireland, since when it has spent most of its time stored in a wooden chest at Castle Howard in Yorkshire, where the famous TV series Brideshead Revisitedwas set. Now the object is on loan to NUIM, where its contents are being slowly and carefully photographed for future study.

The scroll was a going-away present from the people of Ireland to a former chief secretary, George Howard, also known as Lord Morpeth and later the 7th Earl of Carlisle, after he lost his parliamentary seat in West Yorkshire in 1841.

It was an unusual gift, even by the standards of the time. Elsewhere in the Castle Howard collection is a magnificent wine cooler presented to him on the same occasion by his English friends: an item made in Leeds from polished bog oak and silver gilt, and worth at least 1,000 guineas.

Why his Irish admirers opted instead for a vast collection of signatures – representing between three and four per cent of the country’s then population – is just one of the questions a team led by Prof Chris Ridgeway and Dr Terence Dooley of the NUIM’s centre for the study of historic Irish houses and estates hopes to answer.

No doubt part of the reason was Howard’s role in expanding the electoral franchise here. A supporter of Catholic (and later Jewish) Emancipation, as well as of the 1832 Reform Act, which greatly extended the vote generally, he prided himself on being a champion of Ireland.

As chief secretary, he pushed through improving legislation on tithes, municipal government, and poor law. He was a friend of Daniel O’Connell (who would later depose Howard’s grandfather, the fifth Earl of Carlisle, as the person commemorated by the most famous bridge over the river Liffey).

And all told, his reforming tendencies were too much for some of his constituents. After a canvass in 1832, he wrote to a friend: “Several political unions attempted a demonstration against me on the grounds of my birth and my not being supposed to carry some liberal opinions so far.” He also got into trouble in Yorkshire on a separate occasion for suggesting that Irish women were more chaste than their English counterparts. But despite his admiration for them, Irish women do not appear to feature on the scroll, further suggesting a link between those who signed and the electoral register.

From the organiser of the petition – the Duke of Leinster – downwards, the signatories all identified themselves as “Reformers of Ireland”. Near the top of the list is the name of Charles Bianconi, a former mayor of Clonmel, who founded a horse-drawn forerunner of Bus Éireann. He is joined by a who’s who of the nobility, gentry, clergy, merchants, traders and other classes: making this effectively a census of persons of rank (with certain political leanings) in pre-Famine Ireland.

The Duke of Leinster lived in Carton House, Maynooth. So in lending the scroll to the local university, Castle Howard is bringing the project back home. With the help of technology from An Foras Feasa, the petition is now being digitised and fed into a database: a task that that will take until September.

The scroll was not Ireland’s only tribute to the Earl of Carlisle, who would later return as viceroy in the 1850s. After his death, a bronze statue was erected in the Phoenix Park. It stood for 90 years in the People’s Gardens, a few yards from Garda headquarters. But not even the heavy security presence nearby could save it from republicans’ mid-20th century war on statues.

In the early hours of a July morning in 1958, the earl was blown off his pedestal. His 8ft-high likeness was separated neatly from its base in the explosion, and The Irish Timeslater speculated that it must have attained considerable altitude before landing again nearby, embedded deeply in the ground. The rest of the monument was later removed.

Half a century on, happily, the bronze earl is back on its feet. Even as the scroll has travelled from Yorkshire to Ireland, the statue has gone the other way. It was recently re-erected at Castle Howard, albeit minus the pedestal.